Articulations

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Print Collection Lands at UT

Once you've acquired a treasury of art as significant as the Suida-Manning Collection -- 650 exquisite paintings and drawings from the Renaissance and Baroque -- what do you do for an encore? How about acquire one of the most comprehensive collections of prints ever assembled by a private individual? That's what UT-Austin's Blanton Museum of Art has done. This past week, UT-Austin President Larry Faulkner and Blanton Museum Director Jessie Otto Hite announced that art historian Leo Steinberg has given the Blanton his collection of more than 3,200 prints, encompassing work from the 15th through the 20th centuries. While the collection's monetary value -- stated as $3.5 million -- is only one-tenth that of the Suida-Manning, it's no less breathtaking an addition for the museum. The collection's scope and depth are exceptional, spanning the Renaissance to modern eras, from prints of Michelangelo masterpieces and works of his now lost to a print by Jasper Johns of his early success Ale Cans, including works by Dürer, Rembrandt, Piranesi, Fragonard, Blake, Matisse, Grosz, and Picasso.

Collections such as this are years in the making. Steinberg took 40 years to assemble his. The Russian-born academic, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1945, started in the early 1960s, when little attention was being paid to prints. He was thus able to pick up outstanding samples from the Italian Renaissance and Mannerist periods -- eras of particular interest to him -- for as little as a few dollars apiece. Throughout his career, teaching art history first at Hunter College, then at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he co-founded the Art History Department, and finally at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked for 16 years, he kept building the collection, expanding its scope to include work of later periods, including the 20th century.

A noted author, whose published works range from The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion to Encounters with Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Steinberg was invited to Austin as a visiting lecturer in 1995. While here, he was so impressed with the Blanton's collection of prints -- and with curator Jonathan Bober, whose father had taught Steinberg at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in the mid-1950s -- that he felt the Blanton would be "a perfect fit" for his collection, "a museum where it will continue to intrigue and inspire students and be recognized as a resource for teaching, research, and sheer pleasure." Prior to his donation of the full collection, Steinberg had given the museum 105 works, and it had purchased another 136 works from him. Under the terms of the current gift, the university is to acquire Steinberg's entire collection through a charitable remainder trust.

The public will have opportunities to explore the riches of this collection as soon as next year. Highlights from the Leo Steinberg Collection will be on view at the Blanton Museum in two exhibitions, the first opening in January of 2003 and the second in September of 2003. For more info, call 471-7324.